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Nice write up, and big oof for actually reading theory. You just have the book on a shelf with the spine facing out, don't actually open it!
Re. that, if we are being (extremely) charitable you could do some interpretation such like: Merchants aren't moving shit and managers aren't managing shit, merchants own something in some theoretical sense and they pay laborers to do the moving and selling and what have you, managers simply employ proll bosses to do the managing while they get blowjobs in their corner suite, somthing somthing 1920's political cartoon.
I don't think this is clearly stated or well supported in the actual text, but you could make the argument.
I suppose so. If you own capital, then you can pay people to make pretty much every decision on how that capital is managed, how the risks are hedged, et cetera. At this point, the only thing you're actually doing is allowing the money to move - which is not, strictly speaking, labor. The owner does not have to be the manager.
There is risk, and the mainstream theory of value rewards those who dare to risk and do so profitably. However, I don't see how risk debunks the labor theory of value. It's plainly not labor to risk what you own.
If two products both take one hour to make from the same inputs, but one is destroyed half the time and the other one isn't then is one more valuable than the other?
Two products are more valuable than one.
If we have two products and we know one of them has 50% chance to break, then the other one is more valuable.
If we have two products, where one could be destroyed but wasn't, and the other was never in danger, I'd say they're the same.
What if they're not interchangeable? From your model it would never make sense to work on an product that has any chance of failure, and a lot of products intrinsically do.
I don't see where you're going with this. A lot of products have a chance of failure, but few products have none, so we prefer to work on those that have the least chance to fail.
There are many products that have a risk component that we as a society value. No rational agent would ever work on something with a risk element if that wasn't represented in the final valuation of the product. Therefore a labor only theory of value that doesn't include risk doesn't actually track what society values.
Yes. Hence me noting that the non-labor theory of value recognizes risk as valuable, but that within the labor theory of value, risk isn't labor.
It's my belief that if you grant these three things then you have to conclude that the labor theory of value is false.
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